The year 1881–2, as a major watershed in modern Jewish history, looms large over what came after. In that year the problem of Russian Jewry was first revealed in something of its true magnitude and menace; the vision of the exodus caught the popular imagination and at the same time became an issue of wide-ranging political debate; and Jewish nationalism became a significant political force. These developments in turn made possible the gradual emergence (first in the emigrations, later in Russia) of the Jewish socialist movements that sought a synthesis between socialism and Jewish nationalism or, at the very least, between internationalism and the cause of Jewish auto-emancipation.

But for all the centrality of 1881–2, it should not blind the observer to what had gone before. It opened a new era in the sphere of political action but not in that of political thought. Highly articulate theories of Jewish socialism had been formulated long before the assassination of Alexander II. There was no constituency of any significant size ready to adopt these ideologies. They were not written in response to any widely perceived imperatives. They were, rather, the work of men in the wilderness, seeking to bridge the inner gulf between their instinctive loyalties to the Jewish world in which they had grown up and their commitment to the avant-garde, revolutionary world. This anticipation in miniature of the future has its own intrinsic and independent importance.